From 1718 to 1720 France launched a systematic effort to recruit English woolens workers, glass makers, clock and watch makers, ship wrights, and especially metallurgists. The recruiter encountered a characteristic of British industry: the division of labour. Workers only knew their own small portion of the process. This made the task too costly and inefficient. It’s easy to call the this industrial espionage due to the predatory “hiring away” by France, but the next two are not such clear-cut examples of industrial espionage.
In 1764 and 1765 the French monarch dispatched Gabriel-Jean Jars to visit English mines, smelters, and foundries. Amazingly, he was well received. His reports are used today by historians for the detailed descriptions of the industrial techniques he witnessed.
Insensible to international competition, the British Board of Longitude allowed French visitors to examine the revolutionary marine clocks of John Harrison in 1769. Harrison, quite rightly, flew into a rage when he learned of this.
Competitive Intelligence or Industrial Espionage?
These last two examples raise the question, is it industrial espionage if you knowingly give the data to the competition when they openly ask for it? Were the last two models for early competitive intelligence?
The need for better skills to turn data into information during investigations is not new. Unfortunately, our education system has not kept up with developments in computers and management information systems . The ever-increasing tide of data has outstripped the ability of Investigators to make use of the data. The problem of general data analysis is no longer a small one that can be ignored. Statistics about every facet of business and our daily lives surround us. Yet when confronted by statistics, most Private Investigators don’t know how to evaluate the statistics, the data upon which they are based, or the collection method.
If you are in the position of having to evaluate statistics and don’t have much experience with this area, then these two excellent short books that cover most of what you need to know:
How to Lie With Statistics
and Statistics Without Tears (Penguin Science)
Both of these appear on our Books Page.
Jill Fenton reports on an article about how difficult it is to delete your Facebook profile.
(Un)social networking
I have been interested to read the pros and cons of social networking sites (the girl who’s been banned from having a house party for 10 years, for example!) and came across this recent article in the Sunday Times regarding how to delete your Facebook profile (rather than just ‘deactive’ it - the Facebook default).
“If you visit the account section of Facebook you are offered only the opportunity to “deactivate”. This merely hides your public profile until you next log in. It’s a useful option if you are likely to return. To delete your details permanently you must first unearth the anonymous-looking customer service form that is hidden away at tinyurl.com/2xv52v. When completing this form tell Facebook in both the subject and the message fields that you wish to have your account deleted. To check if this has been done properly either create a fake Facebook account or ask a friend to search for your details a few days later.”
For about three decades I’ve been an Investigator. It’s a very dangerous job.
Sitting in a car watching what people do and what they shouldn’t do. Hour after hour slaving over a hot computer searching for data and producing reports. Sifting through papers, tabulating costs, and organising file material at a desk.
It’s dangerous work. Hear ye the Investigator’s lament!
Over one pound per year have I gained.
Flexibility have I lost.
Physical endurance I have no more.
Of cholesterol I have an abundance.
I can see this dangerous job taking its toll on the young guys who have less than a decade’s experience. Car accidents, whiplash, carpal tunnel syndrome, obesity, repetitive stress injuries, and back problems, but no shootings, stabbings, or similar misadventures.
Being a Private Investigator is the world’s most dangerous sit-down job.
In future articles I will outline my solutions to some of these perils.
Today’s work has been downright strange.
First I was asked to research the online antics of one of those annoying individuals often found on blogs and forums. I found some very immodest pictures of her on a lesbian dating service. That led to a treasure trove of artfully composed pictures of her doing some unusual sexual gymnastics. I don’t know if any of this was relevant to the original research mandate, but it was interesting.
Right on the heels of that, I was asked to find a field telephone for use during an extended rural surveillance. It seems the subject was a Ham radio operator and scanner fanatic. I found a field telephone that was voice powered. I hope they have fun lugging around a mile and a half of wire.
Google-Free Wednesday
I’ve been using meta-search sites much more often over the last few months. Some are good, some aren’t. Here are two clustering meta-search sites that don’t measure up.
KillerInfo
KillerInfo purportedly searches Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Lycos. You can select the engines you want to search on the advanced search page. However, if you only select just Yahoo and Lycos and search Tibet, it will not return any results for those two search engines. You either get a response that says the syntax is unsupported by the search engines or it just says nothing and provides no results. If you go the the search engines and do the same search, then you get a huge list of results. Of course, it provides good results for Google and MSN, but what good is that on Google-Free Wednesday?
Like Clusty, KillerInfo is powered by Vivisimo. Clusty says it searches Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast, and Live. A search using Tibet returns results from all these and more. If Visisimo can get Clusty to work, why not KillerInfo?
I would like to use Clusty and KillerInfo in tandem. This would search the major search engines using a similar interface for both the search input and the results. Too bad KillerInfo can’t even handle a one word search statement in Yahoo and Lycos.
KartOO
This meta-search site bills itself as a “visual meta search engine”. This has some promise but it is difficult to navigate through the results “map”. It is also difficult to eliminate irrelevant results without getting lost and having to start over. When I was trying to figure-out how to use KartOO the Help pages were not found on the server.
Most of the results I got were from Yahoo and MSN so this did not seem to offer any unique coverage.
I’m not a big fan of meta search engines, but one does standout and find its way into my regular tool-kit. One of the problems with Internet searching is building the correct string of search terms for a particular search engine.
Search Engines
I use clustering search engines and directories to help build the most specific search statement, but I’m still left with the problem of knowing if I have found the best search engine to use for that statement. The large search engines, Google, MSN (Live Search), and Yahoo offer the largest databases, but it takes more than typing in a person’s name to get relevant results. Long search statements must be structured properly for each search engine. Trying to create the best search statement for Yahoo or Live Search takes some effort starting with a hunt for the list of operators and the syntax documentation. You will notice that a comparison with Google that the search operators and syntax are somewhat different.
Operators
A meta-search that searches these three search engines gives-up some operators. Such a rudimentary meta-search site would not be of much use; unless it allowed you to compare the results from each search engine. It would also be useless if it didn’t allow the NOT, PHRASE, and MUST CONTAIN operators in a form that is recognised by all the search engines. Jux2 provides this functionality. Continue reading ‘Comparitive Searching’
An interesting post on B2B Sales Pipline:
Adam…asked a pricing question about an application component that could not be purchased alone…
…this question doesn’t pass the “Smell Test”…
Called him anyway…Cell Phone, with no company name provided…
…search Adam’s name in LinkedIn. Lo and behold - Adam works for a competitor. I called the competitors office, asked for Adam, and let him know that I would love to chat with him, since it’s always good for competitors to get to know each other. At the time of this posting, Adam has not called me back, and has likely joined the witness protection program.
This kind of amateurish nonsense passes for Competitive Intelligence far too often.
From Sources And Methods blog:
Wikileaks has done a service by collecting a variety of photos and videos on the recent unrest in Tibet on its website. The photos are all from the AP but it is a very good collection nonetheless. The videos are more helpful as they come from a variety of news sources and having them all in one place is a nice feature. There even appears to be some footage not previously shown on any of the world’s news services. Wikileaks has compiled the images and video to ostensibly “help drive the footage through the Chinese internet censorship regime — the so called ‘Great Firewall of China’”.
In 1991, Philip Zimmermann developed an encryption technology known as Pretty Good Privacy. Zimmermann, the CEO of PGP Corp., created ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. PGP Corp. has just released Zfone, which is ZRTP-enabled Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) software that prevents Internet telephone call wiretapping.
Forbes.com spoke with Zimmermann about why his company created Zfone which he offers to the public for free. The article is interesting because Zimmermann points-out the intelligence value of traffic analysis, which I mentioned in a previous article. Zfone makes it nearly impossible to eavesdrop on a conversation, but it does not prevent an intelligence service or police service from conducting traffic analysis.
VON Magazine also interviewed Zimmermann in its January 2007 edition about issues surrounding wiretapping and VoIP.
When I travel for work, I undertake what some people consider extreme measures to protect proprietary client data from theft by officials at international borders. These officials do not need warrants to seize or examine anything in your possession when crossing a border and that makes border officials excellent spies. This issue arose recently regarding the actions of the US border officials:
In Canada, one law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with “blank laptops” whose hard drives contain no data. “We just access our information through the Internet,” said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry, a major Toronto law firm. That approach also holds risks, but “those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,” he said.
Creating a “blank laptop” entails more than just hitting the delete key or even using a utility to overwrite existing data. The hacking risk is also greater than most people realize, especially with wireless connections. Even with secure end-to-end encryption, traffic analysis can yield very useful intelligence.
The Google “site:” Operator
The Google “site:” operator is one of the most powerful search tools available from Google for target reconnaissance.
Target Reconnaissance
Once normal search methods locate sites that have useful data and you have explored those links using the cache operator, its time to do some serious anonymous target reconnaissance.
Using the “site:” Operator
This operator allows you to map an entire domain. Use the operator to get a listing of every indexed page on a domain. Try this: site:microsoft.com.
The operator will accept additional arguments. For instance, site:gov secret will search all domains ending in .gov for the word secret. Try it.
Notice that the search results include links to the cached pages for the domain. In conjunction with the site operator, you will use additional arguments targeting your subject. Your anonymous target reconnaissance will be conducted by viewing the cached pages. You will not click on any links on the cached pages as these will go to live pages. You will not allow your browser to download any images on the cached pages, as they may be live images from the target domain. You will be STEALTHY. They won’t see you coming.
Surveillance Book
This book’s title is deceptive: No Tech Hacking: A Guide to Social Engineering, Dumpster Diving, and Shoulder Surfing. (It appears on our Books page and the right side of the main page.)
Every surveillance operative should read this book for its description of what one can learn from proper observation. It is also a must-read for IT security people for its description of these attack methods. This book is about compromising somebody’s security through surveillance and deceit. It also includes many tips for improving what you observe and report as an Investigator.
As an Investigator, one of the greatest problems is properly identifying the subject of your inquiries. You have to deal with misspelled names, incorrect dates of birth, generational designators, and many other obstacles to identifying the subject in your search results.
Face-filters help when you are looking for images and video. But how do you find your person in the thousands of search results that appear when you search by his name alone? Continue reading ‘Clustering Search Engines’
Just when you thought you had them all, you find another. Bill Lowrance found one I hadn’t.
Quintura offers an interesting interface that creates a cloud of related terms as you search. This seems like a good way to find information on people, if the searches I did on myself are any measure of its worth.
The cloud interface is convenient and adding terms adds terms to the cloud without creating an overwhelming cloud of terms.
I like clustering search engines for helping to build better search statements for the large search engines like Google.
